We Mean to Be Counted

Over the past two decades historians have successfully disputed<br/>the notion that American women remained wholly outside the realm of politics until the early twentieth century. Still a consensus has prevailed that unlike their Northern counterparts women of the antebellum South were largely excluded from public life. With this book Elizabeth Varon effectively challenges such historical assumptions. Using a wide array of sources she demonstrates that throughout the antebellum period white Southern women of the slaveholding class were important actors in the public drama of politics.<br/><p><br/>Through their voluntary associations legislative petitions<br/>presence at political meetings and rallies and published<br/>appeals Virginia’s elite white women lent their support to such<br/>controversial reform enterprises as the temperance movement and the American Colonization Society to the electoral campaigns of the Whig and Democratic Parties to the literary defense of<br/>slavery and to the causes of Unionism and secession. Against the backdrop of increasing sectional tension Varon argues these<br/>women struggled to fulfill a paradoxical mandate: to act both as<br/>partisans who boldly expressed their political views and as<br/>mediators who infused public life with the “feminine” virtues of<br/>compassion and harmony.